How do you know your machine isn't infected with something none of the anti spyware programs detect yet? It is trivial for a spyware author to recompile his program and change some of the strings around so that it's no longer detected by antivirus software, or even compress it with a new/modified executeable packer. Remember malware has to be released to the wild and actually infect a rather large number of people before the antivirus/spyware authors will get hold of a copy, analyse it and include a signature, you could be one of the first infections of a new piece of malware.
It's possible to reconfigure qmail, atleast i used a hacked up qmail-scanner that rejects spam or virus content.. I want to make it reject invalid users too, but that's hard to do on the secondary mailservers that don't know which accounts exist on the primary server, and most spams are relayed through the secondaries.
Isn't this how the RFC states mail servers *should* behave? It may not be the correct behavior anymore, but you can't blame ms for following the standards (for once)
Like say, BeOS ? Nopes, no mass market for BeOS (thanks to ms and apple) so no point continuing to produce it. Although there would have been quite a lot of people willing to continue producing an open version of beos, instead they have to start from scratch. As for pulling the weeds, what if you actually wanted to use the old version? lets say you had embedded or lowend hardware and didn't need the bloat of the newer versions or the new versions introduced an incompatibility with some old code you run.
Well a unix system, especially linux, should not need a firewall, some distributions (such as gentoo) don't open any listening ports by default, and all distro's can be configured in this way... You can also use netstat or lsof to determine which process has a given port open, and then either kill or reconfigure it. My system only has 22 open so i can login to it from work.
So write a letter to your bank telling them that by enforcing the use of IE they are not improving security atall, they are actually reducing security and facilitating potential fraud. I wonder if you could get away with suing the bank for forcing you to use a known vulnerable browser (which cannot be patched) and thus putting yourself under unnecessary risk of fraud.
Being not so picky about broken html is a bad thing, it encouraged people to code broken html and think it's acceptable. Aside from this, it was intentional for ie to accept broken html, coupled with ms programs designed to write broken html (frontpage, word) that would intentionally not display in netscape, so they could point at netscape and say "look! its broken" and the average user wouldn't know the truth.
A company is free to make their staff use whatever tools they want, you go to work TO WORK.. If you disagree with the policy, quit and go work someplace else.
If you encounter a site that requires IE and you normally browse using something else, dont fake your user agent or visit the site with ie, that will just furthur solidify the belief of the page author that there arent any users visiting his site with other browsers.. Instead, complain, write an email to every site you encounter that won't render under a standards compliant browser. That way your still safe against some of the recently found holes where exploit code was placed on hacked websites.. And, it will eventually make life easier for those of us who cant run ie. Also, if enough people complain, eventually these sites get fixed.
Software firewalls, virus protection and malware removal tools all add bloat to the system and slow things down.. Such programs SHOULD NOT BE NECESSARY. The mere fact that you need these programs in order to safely connect a windows machine to the internet suggests IT SHOULD NOT BE CONNECTED ATALL. Seriously, windows should not have so many ports listening by default, nor should ie be so pathetically insecure, and users should not be running as administrator by default.
True, 98 doesnt have all the remotely exploitable security holes that 2k/xp do, it still has that swiss cheese browser ie but that can actually be stripped out too, 98 is simply unstable as hell - this was your incentive to upgrade to xp, xp on the other hand is insecure as hell - this is your incentive to upgrade to longhorn or atleast that's the plan.. It turns out that the poor security is blowing up in their face before longhorn is available, so ms miscalculated this one.
Why do MS deserve praise? they've only taken a step towards providing what they promised in the first place.. They shouldnt be praised for fixing security holes, they should be praised if there were no security holes to be fixed in the first place.. So you see why they create mediocre/poor products? Simple, create something really crappy.. then a few months later release a slightly fixed version, bask in the praise, then release another slightly fixed version some time later and possibly charge extra for it, again lap up the praise. This is what they've always done, win3x/9x didnt need to be as pathetically unstable as they were, 2k/xp didnt need to be so horribly insecure, all this was done to make people more receptive to the upgrades... Put it this way, how many remote exploits exist for a default install of win98 compared to xp? Yeah, they made 9x unstable as hell to sell you the "new stable!" xp and now they make xp insecure to sell you the "new secure!" longhorn in a few years... Seems it backfired on them tho, the poor security is causing people to migrate away instead of waiting for the upgrade like good little sheep, so here comes sp2.. the stop gap measure to try and keep the sheep in the pen.
Well gentoo downloads the complete new source and recompiles it, works well but doesn't solve the problem of time, infact it makes it worse.. Gentoo also doesn't download patches for packages when you already have the older source, it downloads the whole new version. What would be better for binary distributions is an rsync style system for updating the system binaries, rsync can do delta compression and wont touch any files that havent been modified.
Well aren't SGI a supporter of linux? They atleast run linux on a number of their workstations and on their new itanic kit, perhaps they would be willing to open up their code to linux developers?
Well perhaps they could open up the bits which *are* theirs, i'm sure the functions which interface directly with hardware are theirs atleast afterall who would they buy software to directly interface with their own hardware from? As for the higher level functionality, that could be copied from existing opensource drivers for the most part anyway.. If they did like sun did with staroffice, release everything they had the rights to and let the community replace the missing bits... Once most of the framework was in place, it wouldn't be hard to change the hardware interface for newer hardware but they would have the advantage of a driver they didnt have to license code from anyone for. They could also release it under a license similar to qt, dual gpl/nvidia licensing
And if ATI stole their code, they would either have to release it under the GPL too, complete with nvidia copyrights all over it which wouldn't do their business any good, or they could just steal it and incorporate it into their binary only drivers and risk being sued.
Actually a lot of access points work this way, but they will resolve dns queries and any IP you try to connect to will get transparently proxied to their signup page... The thing is, DNS works.. so you can tunnel over dns!
And how difficult would it be to socially engineer the hosting facility staff (many of whom aren`t very bright) into providing access into a machine.. Not only could you own someone, but you could charge them for the privilege of being owned!
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Or in new-zealand, where dvd region codes are illegal and all players *MUST* be region free.
Well since the device allows updating the firmware, is it possible that a bad dvd overwrote the firmware with garbage?
How do you know your machine isn't infected with something none of the anti spyware programs detect yet? It is trivial for a spyware author to recompile his program and change some of the strings around so that it's no longer detected by antivirus software, or even compress it with a new/modified executeable packer. Remember malware has to be released to the wild and actually infect a rather large number of people before the antivirus/spyware authors will get hold of a copy, analyse it and include a signature, you could be one of the first infections of a new piece of malware.
It's possible to reconfigure qmail, atleast i used a hacked up qmail-scanner that rejects spam or virus content.. I want to make it reject invalid users too, but that's hard to do on the secondary mailservers that don't know which accounts exist on the primary server, and most spams are relayed through the secondaries.
Isn't this how the RFC states mail servers *should* behave? It may not be the correct behavior anymore, but you can't blame ms for following the standards (for once)
Well you can always run linux on apple hardware you know
Like say, BeOS ?
Nopes, no mass market for BeOS (thanks to ms and apple) so no point continuing to produce it.
Although there would have been quite a lot of people willing to continue producing an open version of beos, instead they have to start from scratch.
As for pulling the weeds, what if you actually wanted to use the old version? lets say you had embedded or lowend hardware and didn't need the bloat of the newer versions or the new versions introduced an incompatibility with some old code you run.
Well a unix system, especially linux, should not need a firewall, some distributions (such as gentoo) don't open any listening ports by default, and all distro's can be configured in this way...
You can also use netstat or lsof to determine which process has a given port open, and then either kill or reconfigure it.
My system only has 22 open so i can login to it from work.
So write a letter to your bank telling them that by enforcing the use of IE they are not improving security atall, they are actually reducing security and facilitating potential fraud.
I wonder if you could get away with suing the bank for forcing you to use a known vulnerable browser (which cannot be patched) and thus putting yourself under unnecessary risk of fraud.
Being not so picky about broken html is a bad thing, it encouraged people to code broken html and think it's acceptable.
Aside from this, it was intentional for ie to accept broken html, coupled with ms programs designed to write broken html (frontpage, word) that would intentionally not display in netscape, so they could point at netscape and say "look! its broken" and the average user wouldn't know the truth.
A company is free to make their staff use whatever tools they want, you go to work TO WORK.. If you disagree with the policy, quit and go work someplace else.
But this makes people think everyone is using IE, resulting in more ie-only pages being made..
Infact, IE6 offers virtually nothing that 5 doesnt, development has virtually ground to a halt, theres been no innovation from ie for years
If you encounter a site that requires IE and you normally browse using something else, dont fake your user agent or visit the site with ie, that will just furthur solidify the belief of the page author that there arent any users visiting his site with other browsers.. Instead, complain, write an email to every site you encounter that won't render under a standards compliant browser. That way your still safe against some of the recently found holes where exploit code was placed on hacked websites..
And, it will eventually make life easier for those of us who cant run ie.
Also, if enough people complain, eventually these sites get fixed.
Software firewalls, virus protection and malware removal tools all add bloat to the system and slow things down.. Such programs SHOULD NOT BE NECESSARY.
The mere fact that you need these programs in order to safely connect a windows machine to the internet suggests IT SHOULD NOT BE CONNECTED ATALL.
Seriously, windows should not have so many ports listening by default, nor should ie be so pathetically insecure, and users should not be running as administrator by default.
True, 98 doesnt have all the remotely exploitable security holes that 2k/xp do, it still has that swiss cheese browser ie but that can actually be stripped out too, 98 is simply unstable as hell - this was your incentive to upgrade to xp, xp on the other hand is insecure as hell - this is your incentive to upgrade to longhorn or atleast that's the plan.. It turns out that the poor security is blowing up in their face before longhorn is available, so ms miscalculated this one.
Why do MS deserve praise? they've only taken a step towards providing what they promised in the first place.. They shouldnt be praised for fixing security holes, they should be praised if there were no security holes to be fixed in the first place..
So you see why they create mediocre/poor products? Simple, create something really crappy.. then a few months later release a slightly fixed version, bask in the praise, then release another slightly fixed version some time later and possibly charge extra for it, again lap up the praise.
This is what they've always done, win3x/9x didnt need to be as pathetically unstable as they were, 2k/xp didnt need to be so horribly insecure, all this was done to make people more receptive to the upgrades...
Put it this way, how many remote exploits exist for a default install of win98 compared to xp? Yeah, they made 9x unstable as hell to sell you the "new stable!" xp and now they make xp insecure to sell you the "new secure!" longhorn in a few years...
Seems it backfired on them tho, the poor security is causing people to migrate away instead of waiting for the upgrade like good little sheep, so here comes sp2.. the stop gap measure to try and keep the sheep in the pen.
Well gentoo downloads the complete new source and recompiles it, works well but doesn't solve the problem of time, infact it makes it worse.. Gentoo also doesn't download patches for packages when you already have the older source, it downloads the whole new version.
What would be better for binary distributions is an rsync style system for updating the system binaries, rsync can do delta compression and wont touch any files that havent been modified.
Well aren't SGI a supporter of linux? They atleast run linux on a number of their workstations and on their new itanic kit, perhaps they would be willing to open up their code to linux developers?
Well perhaps they could open up the bits which *are* theirs, i'm sure the functions which interface directly with hardware are theirs atleast afterall who would they buy software to directly interface with their own hardware from?
As for the higher level functionality, that could be copied from existing opensource drivers for the most part anyway..
If they did like sun did with staroffice, release everything they had the rights to and let the community replace the missing bits...
Once most of the framework was in place, it wouldn't be hard to change the hardware interface for newer hardware but they would have the advantage of a driver they didnt have to license code from anyone for.
They could also release it under a license similar to qt, dual gpl/nvidia licensing
And if ATI stole their code, they would either have to release it under the GPL too, complete with nvidia copyrights all over it which wouldn't do their business any good, or they could just steal it and incorporate it into their binary only drivers and risk being sued.
ATI also have a reputation for making shoddy windows drivers
Interestingly tho, openssh has had more security advisories than the original ssh
Actually a lot of access points work this way, but they will resolve dns queries and any IP you try to connect to will get transparently proxied to their signup page...
The thing is, DNS works.. so you can tunnel over dns!
And how difficult would it be to socially engineer the hosting facility staff (many of whom aren`t very bright) into providing access into a machine..
Not only could you own someone, but you could charge them for the privilege of being owned!